Shakespeare: A Life (39 page)

signs in two kinds of evidence in the Blackfriars transaction and in
the poet's legal will. From what is known of Shakespeare's behaviour,
he was easy and companionable but also rapid and fluid in his
responsiveness and adaptability, and likely to hold to not more than a
few central moral principles as he observed and reflected the
viewpoints of others; his plays develop their ideas in a complex
dialectic. He valued the stability he could have found in normal
relations with his wife, and there is enough evidence to suggest that
he worried over his heritable estate and thought it vulnerable.
Certainly, in 1596, the prospects of that estate depended on a crucial
emotional bond he had with Anne in their children.

And yet that bond, in effect, involved their boy's life. Their son
Hamnet Shakespeare, at 11, may have completed Lower School. This would
have been normal, and one need not suppose the boy was as precocious
as children can be in his father's plays. For the parents of any
child, death seemed an ever-present threat. A third of all children
born in England never reached the age of 10. Frighteningly, infectious
diseases killed quickly, and one was seldom under the illusion that a
child might not be lost. As it happened, nothing saved the
Shakespeares' only son, who died early in August of some unknown cause.
On the 11th, the little boy was buried at Holy Trinity, and a clerk
noted in the burials register:

Hamnet filius William Shakspere
¹⁵

Such a loss could affect a wife even more sharply than it did her
husband. If Anne was moved to cry out, that was not quite forbidden, but
excess grief showed 'weakness and lack of control' -- and any display
of pain was less befitting than joy over an innocent soul saved.
¹⁶
Death was very public in Stratford, and one calmly discussed one's
dead child. The poet, in his verse, chose not to do so, though it is
sometimes said that Sonnet 37 bears on his loss: 'As a decrepit father
takes delight', Shakespeare begins,

To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spight,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

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But that, at best, vaguely alludes to his young boy. Heavily moved by
a son's death, Ben Jonson, for instance, was eloquent in writing of his
own boy's loss. In contrast, Shakespeare in these years devoted
himself to comedy, to finishing up his history series and turning to
Caesar's Rome. Had he died in this decade, he would be well remembered
as the best in a group of Tudor playwrights, but he lived on to write
plays that hardly allow one to compare him with anyone else, and his
son's death changed him. He seems never to have recovered from the
loss. What evolved was an intelligent complication of his view of
suffering, so that he came to identify with those in extreme,
irremediable pain; his grief increased his inwardness while perhaps
making him mock any worldly success he might achieve. It is useless to
argue that he could not have written his most intellectually assured
tragedies had his son
not
died; he was not yet writing such
plays in 1596. But Hamnet's death, this bitter and terrible loss,
deepened the artist and thinker: that loss would have helped him to
avoid the last, lingering drawbacks of his technical facility, that
legacy of his youth, and to gather up his strength for the most
emotionally complex and powerful dramas the English stage has known.

About a year after Hamnet died, the playwright was able to settle his
wife and two daughters in an ample house just across from the old
Gild chapel. The grammar school, of course, was close to the chapel,
and in a sense Shakespeare was back where he began. Anne with her
children Susanna and Judith, then aged 14 and 12, moved into New Place
late in 1597, or in any case not after February 1598. The house was
almost excessively roomy and very pleasant, with five gables, three
storeys, and wide grassy borders setting it back from the corner of
Chapel Street and Chapel Lane (also known as Dead Lane and Walkers
Street). Ten rooms were warmed by fireplaces -- at a time when
fireplaces were taxed as a luxury. There were two gardens and an
orchard, as well as two barns and other outbuildings. Built by Sir
Hugh Clopton late in the previous century, New Place was said to be
the second-largest house at Stratford with a frontage of over sixty
feet,

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a depth along the lane of about seventy feet, and a height of
twentyeight feet at its northern gable. But by odd coincidence, for a
poet who made a living in the melodramatic theatre, the house was
linked with dire crime, or with two murders, one of which occurred as
his wife was about to move in.

Shakespeare's knowledge of savage, calculated family murder is
interesting. It was a murderous time -- but New Place might have been a
magnet for victims and killers. First called 'the Newe Place' when
Adrian Quiney the elder lived in it, this pretty edifice of brick and
timber had been leased by one of the Catholic Cloptons to Thomas
Bentley, a physician to Henry VIII. After Bentley, the house fell into
bad repair, and while its Clopton owner was away in Italy, William
Bott managed to take possession in 1563. In that year, Bott murdered
his daughter Isabella, according to the shoemaker Roland Wheler who
claimed to be an eyewitness. Others who knew of these events seem to
have credited Wheler's deposition. First, it was alleged, Bott
cleverly had forged legal deeds to acquire the property of Isabella's
husband, if she died childless; then he mixed poison in Isabella's
drink. The shoemaker said he was in the house when this happened; he
saw the 'spoon', the ratsbane, the drink, and noted that Isabella 'did
dye sodenly and was poysoned with rattes bane and therewith swelled
to death'.
¹⁷
Bott never faced a murder charge, for if he were hanged, the
shoemaker said, Isabella's widower as well as the house's true owner
would 'lose all their lands which the said Bott had beguyled them of'.
¹⁸

A second major crime, nearly on the heels of Bott's occupancy,
jeopardized Shakespeare's right to the house. Bott sold the estate to
William Underhill, whose son and namesake eventually sold it to the
poet. Shakespeare paid about £120 for New Place; the exact amount is
unknown, but it was likely to be double the £60 cited in the 'fine' or
Final Concord pertaining to the sale (the 'fine' usually cited a
fictitious price). An existing copy of the Latin 'fine' does not call
Shakespeare
generosus
or mention an orchard (both defects were
remedied later), but this document of 4 May 1597 assigns to him a
messuage with two barns and two gardens (
'uno mesuagio duobus horreis et duobus gardinis').
¹⁹

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The vendor William Underhill, who lived part of the year at Idlicote,
was a Catholic recusant who appeared to Stephen Burman to be 'subtle,
covetous, and crafty'. However bad he was, his elder boy was somewhat
worse. Two months after the sale to Shakespeare, Underhill was killed by
his son Fulke, then a legal minor, to whom he had orally bequeathed
his lands. Once again, apparently, a murderer connected with the house
used poison, as Claudius does in
Hamlet
, and Underhill died at
Fillongley near Coventry on 7 July 1597. As a result, New Place was
forfeited to the state for felony, and Fulke was hanged for murder in
1599.
²⁰
Even when working on
Hamlet,
Shakespeare virtually had Fulke's parricide at his elbow, since the
crime kept his right to the house insecure until the victim's second
son Hercules Underhill came of age in 1602. In that year Hercules (who
was born on 6 June 1581) secured a clear grant of the estate and
confirmed its sale to the playwright. In buying the property,
Shakespeare thus got in the strange bargain a father's alleged murder
of a daughter, and the murder of a father by his son. He made good use
of what he knew, and the Bott and Underhill stories familiarized him
with the raw, primitive theme of family murder, which he was taking up
with psychological realism. And indeed, what is important about
Hamlet's origins is that the play was created not merely out of
literary sources, or by a 'supposing' of events, but by a poet who took
in ingredients from real life to assimilate them thoroughly with
experiences of his own family, schooling, and town, and with his
private aspirations, hopes, disappointments, and intellectual life. He
knew Underhill, just as his father knew Bott; and the murders in
Hamlet
are not like pictures out of Ovid, not
Titus-
like, but intimately known happenings based in part on real, acutely judged events.

The house was a lucky purchase, whether or not tales of murder
distracted his wife from her loss. On three sides, the place was
surrounded by greenery. In front was 'a little court yard', according to
George Vertue, who in 1737 made a pen-and-ink sketch of the house,
and a second drawing showing servants') quarters on either side of the
court. New Place was partly torn down and rebuilt on neo-classical
lines by Sir John Clopton in 1702 (though the house was not finally
demolished until 1759, by vicar Francis Gastrell of Frodsham), so

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Vertue had to rely, partly, on what others told him. But he is
consistent with the memories of Richard Grimmitt (born in 1683) who
recalled that in his childhood, he and a Clopton boy, when playing,
would cross 'a small kind of Green Court' before entering the house
which was 'fronted with brick, with plain windows, consisting of
common panes of Glass set in lead, as at this time'.
²¹

In the orchard and gardens which ran down parallel with a waterchannel
on the other side of the lane, Shakespeare planted roses and apple
trees. Writers gravely add up the number of horticultural allusions in
the dramatist's works, and sure enough the poet refers to apples about
thirty times, and cites a number of varieties -- the crab, pippin,
bitter-sweeting, pome-water, applejohn and leathercoat. He also refers
to roses on at least a hundred occasions, and gives us no fewer than
eight sorts, the white, the red, the variegated, musk, damask, rose of
Provence, canker or dog-rose, and sweet-brier.
²²
Gardens at the time were often planned with ingeniously laid out beds,
paths, arbours, and trellises, all surrounded by a brick wall or a
high hedge cut into odd, eccentric shapes.

Did his keenness as a gardener lead him to a book such as Gerard
Herbal
( 1597)? Gerard anyway shows that the pretty, blue-petalled speedwell relates to the leek, and is, in Welsh, called
fluellen.
The most sympathetic captain in
Henry V
becomes Fluellen of Wales, but there were Fluellens in the local
parish. Tudor gentlemen compared what they found in books with lessons
from the soil. And Falstaff, perhaps, would not have gone thirsty
here. New Place's vines, evidently grape vines, thrived so well that
Sir Thomas Temple later asked a servant to get some of its 'vine
settes'. Shakespeare's 'cousin', the attorney Thomas Greene of the
Middle Temple, enjoyed 'a pynte of muskadell' of a morning, and his
tastes were well served at New Place to judge from his long stay
there.
²³
There are two allusions to malt on the premises, and monthly brewing
would have been normal. Anne Shakespeare no doubt looked after the
brewing, and she had plenty of malt in the winter of 1598.

Yet in connection with using malt for ale-making, tempers were
running high at Stratford. Malt derives from barley -- a staple food
so costly it was nearly out of reach of the poor. Just then, people

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were enraged by malt-hoarders, and the town was close to open rebellion.

In buying a fine house Shakespeare had caught the eye of some of the
gentry. Old friends of his father such as Adrian Quiney and his son
Richard, a man of genial advice, took a keen interest in him. In fact he
was of special use to Richard Quiney and Abraham Sturley. Both were
amiable, well-educated aldermen, who happened to be in trouble. Bad
harvests had affected the price of grain cruelly, and Quiney and
Sturley had been hoarding malt to release their stocks at inflated
prices.

Faced with a starvation
crisis in the Midlands, the Queen's Council cracked down on hoarders
and ordered a Stratford survey. The results appear in a 'Noate of Corn
and Malt', dated 4 February 1598, and, oddly, in Quiney's
handwriting. Out of seventy-five local households with grain or malt
only thirteen barns have more than Shakespeare's own, with its ten
quarters (or eighty bushels):

W m Shackespere x q uar trs 24

10

That was a large supply. To be sure, the schoolmaster Mr Aspinall had
eleven quarters, and the vicar Mr Byfield six of his own, four of his
sister's, but it is hard to believe that Anne needed eighty bushels.

Her husband was then in London, and lately he had talked of
investing. Apparently he had spoken to his father about putting some
money into land. On 24 January, Sturley, at any rate, had written to
Richard Quiney, who was himself then in the capital, to say that 'our
countryman Mr Shakespeare is willing to disburse some money upon some
odd yardland [about 30 acres] or other at Shottery or near about us'.
This hint comes from Quiney's old father Adrian, a close friend of
John Shakespeare for three decades. The Quineys were mercers, or
sellers of fine cloth, silk, and oddments, but their trade declined, and
malting had become the town's chief industry. Often in London on
town-council business, young Quiney typically interviewed the
Exchequer, obtained fire-relief funds, pressed for a new town charter,
or secured Stratford's exemption from taxes. Much like his friend
Sturley, who had been at Queens' College, Cambridge and who sent him
news, Quiney was a civic-minded man who, now and then, con-

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